Queen Elizabeth II Hall Programme

Friday 4th September 2026

Water Time - The Challenges and Benefits of Cross Party Working with a Thames focus

  • Matthew Wright, Broadcaster, Panel Chair

  • Yuan Yang, MP for Earley and Woodley

    Yuan Yang is the Member of Parliament for Earley and Woodley. In July 2026 she was appointed as Parliamentary Private Secretary to the Chancellor of the Exchequer. She was a member of the Treasury Select Committee from 2024 to 2026.

    She is an economist by training, and after her master's degree, founded Rethinking Economics, a charity that campaigns to make economics teaching more relevant to the real world.

    Before being selected by the Labour Party to stand for Parliament, she spent eight years working as a journalist at the Financial Times, where she was previously FT Europe-China correspondent, and before that their Beijing deputy bureau chief.

  • Freddie van Mierlo, MP Henley and Thame

  • Jack Rankin, MP for Windsor

    Jack grew up in Ashton-under-Lyne, just outside Manchester. Before entering Parliament, he worked in the energy sector, specialising in trading and investment, and served as the youngest-ever Cabinet member on his local Council, leading on Property and Economic Development.

     

    He was elected as the Member of Parliament for Windsor last July. In his first year in Parliament, Jack has spoken out on issues ranging from the freedom of speech and national security to housing and small business. He serves as a Shadow PPS and sits on the 1922 Committee Executive.

Regulating rivers for the future (How will the new joined-up approach work in practice?)

  • Shosha Adie, ENDS Report, Panel Chair

    Shosha is a senior environmental journalist at the award-winning UK green policy news outlet, ENDS Report, and her niche is water and chemicals regulation. She has recently been recognised in the PPA Next Gen Awards as a rising star in the industry. She is also a regular contributor to the ECO Chamber podcast.

  • Chris Walters, Interim CEO, Ofwat

    Chris Walters was appointed interim Chief Executive of Ofwat in August 2025. Chris joined Ofwat in June 2023 as Senior Director for the Price Review and became an Executive Member of Ofwat’s Board.


    He led the development and delivery of the 2024 Price Review (PR24), which sets the price, service, and incentive package for water companies from 2025 to 2030. Chris brings extensive public sector leadership experience, with a strong background in economics and economic regulation.


    Before joining Ofwat, Chris was Director of Pricing and Costing at NHS England, where he oversaw national policy and implementation on healthcare pricing. Earlier in his career, he held senior roles at the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) and the Office of Fair Trading (OFT), including serving as Chief Economist. He has also worked as a management consultant and academic.


    Chris holds a PhD in econometrics from London Business School, and degrees in economics from the London School of Economics and the University of London.

  • Helen Wakeham, Director of Water, Environment Agency

    Helen Wakeham MSc FCIWEM is a water, land and environment professional with 30 years’ experience in environmental policy and regulation. Her career has spanned incident management and prevention, research, European Directive and Best Available Technique development, agriculture and land management policy and flood risk. She most recently led the transformation of the Environment Agency’s regulation of the water industry. She is currently Director of Water at the Environment Agency. Outside of work she enjoys being in, on and under our rivers, lakes and sea.

  • Richard Benwell, CEO of Wildlife & Countryside Link

    Richard Benwell is chief executive of Wildlife & Countryside Link. He is also a board member of the Broadway Initiative and UK Youth for Nature and Chair of Oxfordshire's Local Nature Partnership.

  • The Audience

Paul Powlesland - The Case for River Guardianship in an Age of Systemic Failure

Paul Powlesland is a barrister and founder of Lawyers for Nature which campaigns to have the Rights of Nature recognised in law & policy in the UK. He is a guardian of the River Roding, London’s third biggest river, and upholds the rivers rights and interests in the systems that affect it, as well as carrying out practical restoration and protection of the river.

Monica Feria-Tinta - Do Rivers Have Rights

Monica Feria-Tinta, author of the acclaimed A Barrister for the Earth, delves into the concept of the Rights of Nature and looks at how this concept has been applied to rivers, with a particular emphasis on developments in the UK.  Monica is a leading barrister at the Bar of England & Wales and a premier global expert in strategic environmental litigation, famously fighting to secure legal rights for natural entities like rivers, oceans, and ecosystems.  She's acted as counsel in ground-breaking precedents on climate justice globally and on Rights of Nature, including  in the landmark Los Cedros case. Monica is counsel for Mar Menor (European Court of Human Rights) and advised in the River Ouse river Charter, and River Wye's.  Her book, A Barrister for the Earth, was a finalist at the Westminster Book Awards. Monica has been referred to as 'one of Britain's most dazzling legal minds’.

The Power of People

  • Matthew Wright, Panel Chair

    Matthew Wright is one of this country’s best known journalists and broadcasters now hosting Weekend Breakfast on LBC. A regular on TV’s This Morning, Matthew hosted his own show Channel 5’s The Wright Stuff for 18 years during which time he interviewed everyone from reality stars to Prime Ministers as well as eating all manner of nasties in the I’m A Celebrity Jungle. A keen fly-fisher, clean water campaigner and vintage motorcycle enthusiast, Matthew occasionally gets on stage and sings with legendary space rock band Hawkwind.

  • Ash Smith, Windrush Against Sewage

    Ash founded Windrush Against Sewage Pollution with colleague Prof Peter Hammond, as featured in Channel 4's factual drama, Dirty Business. Over 10years WASP has been at the forefront of the exposure of widespread illegal sewage pollution and a corrupted regulatory system.  The small charitable group of volunteers quickly gained a reputation for accuracy and innovation through its engagement with the 2021 Investigation into River Pollution by the Environmental Audit Committee. Several impactful and influential reports have followed, with WASP expanding its small team to include financial investigation. It is currently promoting a parliamentary petition for a referendum to bring water into public ownership and is working with several partners who have identified privatisation as the root cause of pollution and exploitation of the environment and billpayers for profit. Ash is a former Detective Superintendent with Thames Valley Police, with a lifelong love and respect for the natural world and a dislike for injustice and corruption.

  • Becky Malby

    Becky lives in Ilkley and is a Visiting Professor at the University of York and London South Bank. She is a Non-Executive Director at Yorkshire Ambulance Services and works independently with GPs and Integrated Neighbourhood Teams to meet complex needs. She was awarded an Honorary fellowship of the Royal College of GPs in 2025 for her work in reforming General Practice.

    ‘In her spare time’, Becky also leads campaigns to clean up sewage pollution in rivers, lakes and seas both locally (The Ilkley Clean River Group) and nationally (The Sewage Campaign Network). She instigated and chaired The People’s Commission on the Water Sector, a truly independent academic inquiry that demonstrated that public ownership of water is cleaner, cheaper and fairer. Her campaigning includes regular briefings to MPs, mobilising and supporting a network of grassroots campaigners, and media appearances. She secured the first Bathing Status River in the UK which has lead to significant new infrastructure to prevent sewage pollution in the Wharfe. She was awarded the BEM in 2025 for her services to the national cleanliness of rivers and her contribution to her local community. In 2023 she was listed on the ENDS report Power List of 100 UK environmental professionals.

  • Cliff Roney, GMB Union

What If Everything We Made Was Clean?

  • Panel Chair, Lucy Cleland, Co-Founder and Editorial Director, Country & Town House

    Lucy Cleland is the co-founder and editorial director of Country & Town House, the world's first B Corp glossy. She believes in the power of words, beauty, and storytelling to help us navigate our way through these current times. Keeping to the magazine's mantra of 'a life in balance', Lucy tries to carefully balance the urgent need to stop over-consuming by highlighting the products, people and places that are doing things brilliantly, while infusing the pages with joy, fun and inspiration. She wants C&TH to be a place from which readers come away feeling better, thoughtful – and ready for action. 

  • Pippa Neill

    Pippa Neill is the environment reporter at The Guardian. Before that, Pippa was at ENDs. Pippa was awarded the Journalist of the Year prize at the 2025 Association of Online Publishers awards, and in both 2024, 2025 and 2026 she won the Best News Writer category at the British Society of Magazine Editors Awards. Pippa was also a winner of the PPA Next Gen Awards in 2024. Her investigative work includes exposing for both the ENDS Report and the Guardian how the town of Bentham in North Yorkshire became the most PFAS polluted place in the UK. She was the associate producer of 'In Our Blood: The Forever Chemicals Scandal', an ITV Exposure documentary which revealed that residents in Bentham have elevated levels of PFAS in their blood

  • Bernice Pan

    An award-winning sustainable entrepreneur combining vision, theory and practice, Bernice set her mission to problem-solve using design thinking and creative innovation; having identified the systemic issues of over-consumption early on. She gained her PhD in design management and systems engineering for The Fashion System, after architectural degrees at University of Cambridge and Royal College of Art, and a fashion career in New York and London.

    Bernice founded DEPLOY on the principles of its novel 3600 Sustainability compass as a strategic action plan to reform fashion. Winner of the Great British Brand Awards amongst numerous accolades, her speaking engagements span from global summits to top-tier institutions. She is the Editor of Accelerating Sustainability in Fashion, Clothing & Textiles and a contributing author to several books titles (125).

  • Brontie Ansell, Managing Director, Lawyers for Nature

    Brontie is a leading Rights of Nature lawyer and was listed by Vogue as one of their top 100 sustainability innovators of 2024. As Managing Director of Lawyers for Nature and an architect of the pioneering Nature on the Board movement, she works on systemic legal change for the benefit of Nature and non-human communities. Brontie is also a trustee of Treesisters and sits on the advisory board of Common. 

Future for Water Focus

How Citizen Science Shifts the Dial and The Secret Success Story of Britain's Rivers reflect two important threads running through Future for Water's work this year. Both topics have been central to recent Testing the Waters Consortium events citizen science has featured at our last two gatherings, and Tim Palmer spoke at our Section 82 event earlier this year, highlighting the critical and often overlooked role of farmers in river health. We are bringing both discussions to The River Summit & Festival to give them the space and audience they deserve.

How Citizen Science Shifts the Dial

  • Dave Wallace, Panel Chair

    Dave Wallace is a journalist, podcast host, digital strategist and environmental campaigner. He is co-founder of HoT Water, a Henley-on-Thames citizen science group that monitors local water quality, raises awareness of river pollution and campaigns for a cleaner, healthier River Thames. Dave is also Head of Strategy at Shadowmap, where he works to improve understanding of how sunlight influences our health, buildings and daily lives. His work is driven by a simple belief: reconnecting people with nature is a global imperative. He has 30 years’ experience in digital strategy and customer experience. He founded HeathWallace, the world’s first digital agency focused on financial services, growing it from the UK into an international business before selling it to WPP.

  • Dr Kelly Haynes, National Citizen Science Lead, Environment Agency

    Kelly leads the Environment Agency’s Supporting Citizen Science programme of work, providing strategic and technical leadership to strengthen the way they support and apply citizen science to enhance environmental monitoring and catchment planning. Kelly and her team are coordinating this work nationally but delivering locally with a network of locally based EA citizen science coordinators working with internal teams and external catchment partners. ‘As pressures on the water sector grow, it’s more important than ever that we work collaboratively and collectively to monitor and understand our environment in order to find solutions and drive positive outcomes. I am a huge nature advocate, a regular sea swimmer as well as an active citizen scientist!’

    Citizen Science - Working together! | Engage Environment Agency

  • Dr Rachel Walker, Barnes Conservation

    Rachel Walker is a London-based scientist working in conservation research and monitoring. She is interested in studying the environmental factors and ecological interactions that shape biodiversity within different ecosystems. Rachel monitors the impact of restoration works and conservation management interventions across a range of habitats and different taxa in urban areas. She is particularly interested in what indicator species, such as aquatic macroinvertebrates, can tell us about the condition of urban habitats. Throughout her work she aims to generate evidence-based research to identify solutions for practitioners to improve conservation outcomes. 

  • Wilson Phillips

    Wilson has always been happiest in, on or next to water, so when he retired from a career in institutional investment management he was delighted that his wife had built a home on the banks of the River Thames. Concerned about the reports of pollution in the river he started testing the water and now tests using a multitude of testing methods. He created the website www.watertestingriverthames.co.uk which reports the results of many test sites from Oxford to Kingston and encourages data collection and collaboration. When he’s not water testing he's probably fly fishing. 

  • Alex Farquhar, Angling Trust

    Alex Farquhar, Freshwater Campaigns & Advocacy Officer, Angling Trust. Manager of the Water Quality Monitoring Network, with 800 volunteers on rivers across the UK, and Policy Lead at the Testing the Waters Consortium, bringing together 21,000 citizen scientists to fight for cleaner waters and better use of hard-earned data. 

  • Chris Szweda, HoTWater

Are Britain’s rivers a secret success story?

  • Jonah Fisher, BBC Climate/Environment Correspondent

    After nearly 20 years as a foreign correspondent for the BBC in Africa, Asia and Europe Jonah returned to the UK in 2021 to become an Environment correspondent.  Along with many other things he has focused on issues related to sewage pollution and the health of the UK’s waterways. 

  • Professor Andrew Johnson, UK Centre for Ecology and Hydrology

    Prof. Johnson obtained a PhD in Soil Science at Reading University in 1988.  Since 1992 he has been employed as a research scientist at the UK Centre for Ecology and Hydrology.  His work has focused on the impact of chemical contaminants on the natural environment. These environments have included soils, rivers, sewage and groundwater. The contaminants studied include pesticides, endocrine disrupting compounds, pharmaceuticals, personal care products, persistent organic pollutants, metals, nanoparticles and microplastics. To better understand these impacts, he has worked with hydrologists, modellers, ecotoxicologists, ecologists and statisticians at UKCEH and in academia.  He recently led the NERC-funded ChemPop project looking at chemical impacts on wildlife populations.

    He has published over 170 peer reviewed papers, and written a book ‘How to be a better scientist’ by Routledge. His research has received funding from NERC, Defra, Environment Agency, UK Water Industry and the EU.  He remains a visiting Professor at Brunel University and worked as a visiting Professor in Kyoto University, Japan in 2008.  He has been a member of the Defra Hazardous Substances Advisory Committee from 2014 to 2022, the Science Advisory Group for the Environment Agency since 2018 and the European SCHEER working group on chemicals since 2021. On 16th May 2022 he was named as one of the top 100 UK influential environmental professionals who had made the greatest impact by the ENDS Report magazine

  • Tim Palmer, Environmental Farmers Group

    Tim is a retired arable and sheep farmer. He ran his 400ha family farm at West Woodyates in north-east Dorset from 1981 to 2021. He now lives in the Wylye Valley west of Salisbury, is active as a member of the Wylye Valley Farmers cluster, is Water Lead for the Environmental Farmers Group and is a member of the Technical Group for the EA’s Hampshire Avon Diffuse Water Pollution Plan, advising on the development of their Phosphate Loss Tool that farmers are to apply.

    Tim has a degree in Zoology and four years graduate experience in entomology. He has served in local government, including as Leader of Dorset County Council, has been a trustee of Dorset Wildlife Trust and a governor of five schools. He is the past chairman of the Martin Down Farmer Cluster.